Minding MySpace
Balancing the benefits and risks of kids’ online social networks!
As principal of the School of the Arts in San Francisco, a prestigious public high school for aspiring artists and musicians, Donn Harris is passionate about protecting his students’ experiments in free expression. But about two years ago he encountered an example of creative student speech he couldn’t support—a nasty post on the MySpace.com Web site that targeted some of the school’s students. He quickly decided that his devotion to free speech had to take a back seat to his responsibility as a school administrator.
Harris immediately suspended the student responsible and asked him to pull the page off the Web. He called a school assembly to discuss the offensive MySpace page and asked students who’d signed on as “friends” of the site to apologize for the cruel statements they’d endorsed.
Harris is convinced he did the right thing. He acted to protect the students who were attacked and taught their classmates a valuable lesson about appropriate Internet use. But in the murky legal world of online social networking, he’s not certain that the law was on his side.
“I took the leap even though I believed this was probably protected speech and in addition, this was behavior that occurred off campus,” Harris says. “Normally I might not have intervened. But this post targeted a new academy we had just established to increase the number of students who get access to our school, and it mentioned certain students by name. I thought this could be dangerous to students, could have incited violence and threatened to undermine a new and fragile program.”
In this case, the mother of the suspended student, who was mortified by her child’s behavior, supported the discipline, and Harris got no complaints from district administrators.
“I was glad I was able to sell these actions to the larger community,” he says, “but I know if I had been challenged, I would have lost.”
More schools face networking dilemma
Harris’s dilemma is becoming increasingly common. Administrators and school boards across the country are struggling to lawfully manage their students’ use of social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, LiveJournal and Xanga. These sites make it easy for students to post photos, personal information, video clips and music files and to build networks of “friends” across the country, many of whom they may never have met in person. More and more, schools find themselves caught between their legal and moral obligation to provide a safe environment that promotes learning and their students’ constitutional rights to free expression and privacy (see related story on page 24).
One thing is clear: The issue is not going away any time soon. The popularity of social networking sites is skyrocketing.
MySpace.com, which bills itself as a “lifestyle portal for connecting with friends,” is the nation’s most popular networking site, with more than 100 million members; similar sites are popping up all the time.
According to a new study by the Pew Research Center, half of all “online Americans” between ages 12-17 have social networking accounts, transforming what was once “a niche activity,” in Pew’s terminology, into a “phenomenon that engages tens of millions of Internet users.”
Social networking and other forms of digital communication have radically transformed learning, giving students unprecedented access to a world of knowledge and personal contacts that would have been inconceivable a generation ago. But there’s a dark side to this brave new world.
Youngsters with a penchant for cruelty, whose assaults on classmates were once confined to a single classroom or campus, can use the Internet to broadcast their insults or threats to a wide audience. Going online to torment others, or “cyberbullying,” has become a national problem.
Attorney Daniel Shinoff, who works closely with school districts in San Diego, Riverside and Imperial counties, says schools must teach students to be more careful about what information they post on the Web. Harris, the San Francisco principal, cites an example. He recently received a call from investigators at the College Board who’d found a post from a senior describing how she cheated on her Advanced Placement test.
When Harris confronted the student, she confessed. “We came down hard,” Harris says. “She had to go to summer school in order to make up enough credits to graduate from high school, and the college that accepted her almost rescinded its offer of admission.”
Protecting little Susie
There’s also the recurring problem posed by inexperienced social networkers who post compromising photos and personal information, making them potential targets of sexual predators.
“We used to be concerned about protecting little Susie from wandering onto the Playboy site by mistake,” says Ann Flynn, technology director for the National School Boards Association. “Now little Susie’s page looks like Playboy’s.”
“Kids feel anonymous when they’re online,” she adds, “when the reality is just the opposite.”
Educators report that social networking is negatively impacting campus life. NSBA surveyed education leaders who attended the association’s Technology and Learning Conference in Dallas last fall and found that 36 percent said the content of student postings on sites such as MySpace is disrupting learning at their schools.
The biggest problem, cited by 70 percent of those questioned, was their students’ tendency to post inappropriate material on their sites. Just 35 percent of those polled said their districts had policies related to the use of social networking sites. Most who did have policies relied on installing restrictive firewall software on school computers to keep students off the sites while they are on campus. Firewalls and filtering software can make it harder for students to visit forbidden Web sites on school computers, but most experts say these technologies offer only a partial solution. For one thing, sophisticated students can almost always outsmart filtering software.
“When it comes to Web and e-mail filtering, nothing is 100 percent,” says David Vannasdall, principal at Arcadia High School.
Digital generation gap
Complicating the situation is the worrisome digital divide between students who attend school and the grownups in the classrooms and front offices.
“It’s hard not to be overwhelmed by fear,” Vannasdall says. “The students we were traditionally able to control, now know more than you do. And they know how to use it against you.”
Administrators and school board members at Arcadia Unified School District have tried to balance freedom and Web access with oversight. Arcadia High Principal Vannasdall, district Technology and Information Director Robert Leri and Arcadia School Board President James Romo described their technology policy at the California School Boards Association’s Annual Education Conference in San Francisco last year.
Much of the district’s emphasis is on educating students, parents and teachers on how to use the Internet safely and how to monitor what youngsters are doing online. Beginning in the sixth grade, all Arcadia students get their own e-mail accounts, Web pages and access to online discussion groups—all provided by the district. Arcadia has established standards for safe and appropriate technology use in all grade levels and has also integrated “information literacy” skills in its content standards. It’s better, after all, to enlist the cooperation of computer-savvy students than try to outsmart them.
Arcadia has certainly had its share of social networking hassles, from bogus MySpace pages created by students using an administrator’s name to Internet photos of underage students drinking and drugging at off-campus parties. The district deals with these episodes on a case-by-case basis, often warning parents or coaches when students have posted worrisome material.
Parent education and Net filters
Despite the emphasis on educating kids to use the Internet wisely, the district also carefully screens e-mail traffic. Arcadia tracks and records every mouse click on campus computers and carefully screens all incoming e-mail. Less than 30 percent of the 254,841 messages that enter the district’s e-mail system in a typical week are actually delivered; 72 percent—184,079 e-mail messages—are blocked, mostly because they contain blacklisted content.
Social networking experts say schools can help educate parents about the need to pay attention to their children’s online activity. A number of recent national studies have concluded that adults, including most parents, are clueless about what youngsters are doing and
saying online.
“I talk to parents all the time about the need to educate themselves,” says Ron Wenkart, general counsel for the Orange County Department of Education. “If they knew what their kids were up to, many of them would be horrified.”
After touring a number of her friends’ sites, Wenkart decided not to allow his teenage daughter to establish a MySpace Account. “I couldn’t believe the kinds of photos her friends posted,” he says. “This material is permanent. In 10 years when these kids are looking for jobs, it could come back to haunt them.”
Nonetheless, many educators continue to be optimistic that schools can use these emerging technologies to get students excited about learning, once the law becomes clearer about the best way to manage students’ Net activity.
Benefits of ‘an extraordinary tool’
“We need to keep in mind that the benefits of this interactive technology far outweigh the risks,” says Leri, who maintains his own MySpace account so that he can keep track of how students are using social networking. “When it’s used in a positive way, it can be an extraordinary tool.”
NSBA Technology Director Flynn agrees that for all the headaches, digital communications provide some exciting opportunities to improve student learning.
“There are plenty of examples of good uses of social networking,” she says. “Students who may be reluctant to speak up in class are
participating in book discussion blogs and writing for real audiences. There are new Web tools emerging all the time that are enhancing learning.”
Futurist Marc Prensky, author of “Don’t Bother Me, Mom—I’m Learning,” urges schools to engage students by capitalizing on their enthusiasm for digital communication, cell phone technology and electronic games. Prensky, who led a workshop on the subject at CSBA’s 2006 Annual Education Conference, says “digital immigrants” (adults) must understand how “digital natives” (young people) are using technology to connect and learn from each other.
Today’s students are bored by conventional pedagogy; they’re not content to sit quietly while a teacher stands at the blackboard and lectures. “There are many old things that children are doing in new ways,” says Prensky, who recently published a list of 10 classroom activities that use cell phones to teach. “Kids are buying school supplies and even homework on eBay and the Internet, exchanging sites, building games, setting up meetings online, posting personal information and creations for others to check out, chatting with people on cell phones, building libraries of music and movies, screen photoblogging, programming, exploring and creating new social norms.”
“An important question is, how many of these new ways will ever be integrated into instruction—or even understood—
by educators?”
Carol Brydolf (cbrydolf@csba.org) is a staff writer for California Schools.